Tommy Morrison, who died far too young on Sunday, was only tangentially a boxer.

He became famous starring as one in Rocky V, a bad movie with an appealing premise: outsider makes good.

The heavily alluded to, only tangentially stated foundation of that imaginary outsiderness was his skin colour.

In life as in art, Morrison was celebrated for looking different than the best of his colleagues.

He was technically a heavyweight champion, taking out a flagging, flabby George Foreman in the midst of one of his dozen comebacks. However, the belt he won (WBO) didn’t hold much heft with the fight crowd. That also seems fitting in retrospect.

Competing amongst the last great generation of heavyweights (Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Lennox Lewis, Riddick Bowe, et al), Morrison was a name to round out the field, rather than a featured performer.

His career ended in 1996, when he was diagnosed with HIV.

In latter years, Morrison became notoriously connected with the hallucinatory movement that denies the connection between HIV infection and the AIDS virus. As proof of his belief, he quit his meds. That probably cost him his life at age 44. His family has refused to say.

More than as a pugilist, Morrison will be remembered as the last of a type: the Great White Hope.

They hung that on him because he was, well, about as Wonder Bread as it gets, a twangy, swaggering, blond Oklahoman. As usual when generalities rush to the fore, you’ll find enough hidden irony to forge an anvil. Morrison’s father, Tim, is white. His mother, Diana, is Native American.

“Why don’t they call him the Great Native American Hope?” she told Sports Illustrated in the midst of the fat days of her son’s career. “Or at least half a Great White Hope. It’s all so silly.”

Diana Morrison was well ahead of the curve. It seems silly now. It didn’t 20 years ago. What changed?

There are two watersheds in the movement to racially integrate North American sport.

The first is easier to put your finger on — the inclusion of athletes of colour.

We can draw a straight line from Jim Thorpe to Jesse Owens to Jackie Robison.

The second is more elusive. It’s when that shift has taken such deep hold, we stop thinking about it. It’s one thing to integrate. It’s another to normalize that integration.

The best example I can think of takes place off the field, in the Spike Lee-John Turturro exchange that thematically underlies the great modern movie about race, Do the Right Thing, and illustrates the changing times.

“Pino, all you ever talk about is n----- this and n----- that. And all your favourite people are so-called n-----s.”

That’s the moment a bad idea begins to wither — when it’s made ridiculous.

The signposts along the way are few and hard to make out. Attitudes change over years, often unnoticed. One day, race is a front-and-centre topic of conversation. It’s something idly alluded to, as if it didn’t matter (but that, you know, matters).

And then, without ever having called attention to the fact, it has stopped mattering.

When did it happen?

Somewhere between the time Tommy Morrison could be straightfacedly referred as first and foremost an ethnic exemplar, and today, when no one without an axe to grind would think to bring it up. Once exposed, bad ideas don’t explode. They dissipate slowly, ground into dust by goodness.

One strongly suspects the internationalization of all our games is the primary cause. Twenty years ago, the NHL was Canadian, the NBA was American, and Hideo Nomo had yet to change the terms in which baseball scouts saw the world. Soccer — the most all-encompassing sport of all — was still the precinct of immigrants.

As we began to think of sports in global terms, there was a parallel reduction in provincialism.

This isn’t to suggest we’ve entered some post-racial Shangri-La. That struggle’s a long way from over, but it’s over in the mainstream conversation about sports.

If you love sports — and, since you’re reading this, let’s assume you do — this is the very heart of its appeal. It invites you in. It’s common cultural ground during grim times. It’s why no amount of scandal or venality can dent it. As the culture atomizes, sport remains our most important public space.

It’s where aspirational drives — to equality, to understanding — catch their first traction.

The entire appeal is founded on egalitarianism: all are encouraged to play; eventually, the best will separate themselves on merit alone.

Even the people most prone to divisiveness recognize that.

Tommy Morrison didn’t ask to be part of this conversation. He took no active role in it.

But, now that he’s gone, he is in retrospect one of those hard-to-read signposts. An actor, a rogue, a pretty decent fighter, Tommy Morrison is most remarkable for having been part of one of the great changes of our time.

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